Anthropolgy E1

Anthropology

Study of the full scope of human diversity, past and present, and the application of that knowledge to help people of different backgrounds better understand one another.

Cultural Anthropology

Focuses on social lives of living communities. Study ethnic groups, occupations, institutions, advertising, technology, and their own cultures

Linguistic Anthropology

How people communicate through language. How people order their natural and cultural environments using linguistic categories.

Archaeology

Study of past cultures by excavating sites where people lived.

Prehistoric archaeologists

study time period time period before written records

Historic archaeologists

excavate sites occupied during historical times.

Unilineal cultural evolution

idea that human societies could be ranked along a single ladder of progress

Salvage paradigm

to observe indigenous ways of life before traditional languages and customs disappeared

Culture

system of knowledge, beliefs, patterns of behavior, artifacts, and institutions that are created, learned, shared, and contested by a group of people

Cultural norms

group’s ideas or rules about what behavior is appropriate or “normal”. Often unwritten assumptions enforced by society. Challenging them often results in some form of punishment. Challenging them can change culture.

Values

fundamental beliefs about what is true, right, important, and good which are cultivated and promoted by a culture.

Mental Maps of Reality

Constructs created by the human brain to organize and make sense of the overwhelming amount of sensory data taken in. Shaped by enculturation. Dangerous when treated as universal

Power

An individual or group’s ability to bring about change through action or influence. Creates a hierarchy of resource distribution and privileges.

Material power

exerted through coercion or brute force

Hegemony

Ability to create consent and agreement within a population. Culture is an example because it unconsciously shapes people’s norms and values.

Agency

power of an individual or group to contest a component of culture

Globalization

the widening scale of cross-cultural interactions caused by the rapid movement of money, people, goods, images, and ideas within nations and across national boundaries

Transnational

refers to relationships that extend beyond nation-state boundaries without assuming they cover the whole world

Localization

creation and assertion of highly particular, often place-based, identities and communities.

Gellner

local traditions are fading as western ideas replace them

Hybridization

Persistent cultural mixing that has no predetermined direction or endpoint

Biocultural

combination of biology and culture

epigenetic

biological aspects of bodies that work with genes and their protein products

Behavioral

patterned behaviors young learn through teaching and imitation (mass media)

Symbolic\`

linguistic system through which humans store and communicate their knowledge nad conventional understanding using symbols

Prehensile

ability to grasp

Ethnoprimatoloty

looks at human and nonhuman primate interactions

Bipedalism

ability to walk on two feet

Multiple dispersals model

argues humans left Africa in multiple waves. homo spread around western, central, and southern Eurasia, with back and forth gene flow across Africa and Eurasia.

Race

a system that organizes people into hierarchial groups based on specific physical traits that are thought to reflect  fundamental and innate differences rooted in genetic and biological differences

Racism

Repressive practices, structures, beliefs, and representations that uphold racial categories and social inequality

Hypnodescent

mixed-race children assigned to the race of the parent with lower-ranking

Individual racism

expressed through prejudiced beliefs and discriminatory actions, like microaggreasions

Institutional racism

refers to patterns of racial inequality structured through cultural institutions, policies, and systems

Racial ideology

set of popular ideas about race that normalize and validate individual and institutional discrimination

Archeological record

All of the physical remains of human activities that have been recorded by archaeologists

Archeological visibility

degree to which cultural material survives. The further back in time, the less evidence that survives.

Original Affluent Society

Spent hours each day in leisure, socializing, or sleeping. Did not need or desire material goods. Viewed natural environment as affluent and always providing.

Fluted Points

Used to hunt mastodon and mammoths. Triggered population explosion

Pastoralism

animal domestication

Horticulture

plant domestication

Sedentism

practice of living in one place for an extended period of time, rather than being nomadic or constantly on the move

Complex Societies

societies in which socioeconomic differentiation, large populations, and centralized political control are pervasive and defining features. Typically have political formations called states and cities.

city-states

autonomous political entity that consisted of a city and its surrounding countryside

Food needs model

more intensive food production was necessary for complex societies to form

Social conflict theory

large populations require sophistication and scale of food production. early complex lived side by side with tribal societies that produced their own food. the social conflict grew over resources like land and water.

Trade Model

people want objects, foods, or raw materials that neighboring groups produce

Intersectionality

a framework for understanding how multiple factors interact and shape an individuals opportunities (or lack thereof) and their position within societal patterns of stratification

Communities

groups of people sharing a geographic space

Group

those who share a culture

Identity markers

signal that someone is part of a community or gorup

subcultures

people who share similar identity markers

Ethnicity

No biological basis. Based on a person’s ties to culture, language, and a shared history